Salutations! I just had far too much fun, and I think sank well over an hour in on my first play.

I'll share a few impressions first; not great etiquette for a suggestions forum, but as you've only four threads here I hope you won't mind me consolidating.

Nice art, Robin! I like your painting style for the interface. You're not a master, but you've got the confidence to splash colourful and expressive characters all over the place, creating a rich visual experience. Playing puts a smile on my face, and there seems to be something to bring me a grin wherever I look.

Interesting main menu - the positionings of the 'buttons' is a little odd, and could do with some enhanced contrast to draw the eye to the buttons - some, such as exit, are obvious once you focus, but initially slip into the colourful mass. Good though, much better than a simple list menu. Is the Arcade cabinet supposed to be mostly falling off the screen on the right?

Tutorial: Amusing dialogue, does the job. A lot of missions for a little information, but I guess it prevents confusion. You might consolidate more into each 'level' of the tutorial rather than 'next game next game next game', but it's a minor nitpick of no real significance. However, you didn't explain some key features yet - I did not understand 'sealing' caves properly until over half an hour of Arcade - and you didn't prepare me at all for the reality that dwarves are totally insane. I recommend acclimatising players to the 'caretaker for mad drunken fools' aspect of the game, and the way diggers will mine out massive chaotic holes around your base.

I came in and my initial expectations were Dungeon Keeperesque, having played the tutorial - but once I really got to grips with it, I realised the game had more in common with Kevan Davies 'zombie simulator' on proce55ing - uncontrolled AI characters randomly wandering and tunneling, then reacting.

I spent a long time trying too hard to 'control' my mine, attempting to earn enough money to solidify all the walls around my town hall - when I finally achieved this, I found it only caused my miners to bounce off walls until they found the exit, fall into holes a lot, and it was overall a deathtrap. Once an hour had passed, I finally grasped the path to success; carefully popping local caves to discover and eliminate threats before scouting out more distant opportunities while I have distance (therefore time) to react.

I think you'd get a far better rate of adaption/adoption of the game's mechanics were you to make this 'mood' far more clear in the tutorial. Show the player this is about trying to oversee, caretake, and manage maniacs, rather than a puzzle/strategy/rts about fighting and retrieval of materials. Presently, more casual/disinterested/slightly retarded players might drop the game in frustration before they 'click', and that would be a pity.

I found the interface very comfortable, but as noted in one of the other threads, the 'danger alert' bubbles are small, shortlived, and a little useless. The ability to click on them to zoom to the event would remove the tedium and discomfort of RMB-dragging frantically toward the target zone, by which time you may have gotten lost due to the disappearance of the bubble. Aside from this, as I immediately began using the hotkeys exclusively (very well assigned, they're perfect), I'd like the ability to toggle the HUD into 'minimal' mode, if possible. I have no use for the bottom buttons anymore, after my first play.

Oh! I also noted that the very handy 'timewarp' ability isn't mentioned at all in the tutorial. That would have come in very handy while I was learning to lock down floods initially, and improved the fun of my learning experience. I didn't discover it until I barely found it necessary. It would be nice if it lasted longer, and came with a visual/audio effect to indicate the influence, and perhaps 'slowed' time rather than stopped it entirely.

Hm, this thread is turning out a lot bigger than I intended. Apologies for the wall of text, folks - I don't expect personal feedback or a serious reply, but hope my impressions come in helpful. The main reason I came to the forum was for a specific feature suggestion, which I'll get to now.

You have a huge amount of empty space. Even in the 15 minute game available in this beta test, I found myself sitting in a vast cavern before my time ran out on my final game (the only game I survived until the time limit).

Huge. Empty. Pointless. Walls, dynamite - these are too expensive to 'shape' areas, and one invites vandalism while the other courts death. Players enjoy building, enjoy construction as well as merely surviving. Once I grasped the game's mechanics adequately, killed Shamans, mined some more advanced resources, I felt.. Not bored, not yet. But I could feel that I had ceased to climb an incline, ceased to discover much new, and from there on, the game would begin to leak appeal.

Give us something to do in the caverns we dig. Let us carve out our own personal Moria.

I suggest spreading the responsibilities of the Town Hall into multiple buildable structures of a relatively low price, perhaps with the potential for upgrades. The town hall should be weakened, capping Diggers at 2-5, and warriors at 2, perhaps - encouraging us, once we reach a certain stage perhaps five to ten minutes into a game, to build structures such as a Barracks to house more Warriors, a Tavern to increase the spawn-rate of diggers, and bunkhouses to increase the population of dwarves available to become either Warriors or Diggers.

I appreciate Dwarfs! minimalism, so I fully understand if you've already considered and disregarded this notion - but that open, empty, pointless space distresses me - and I feel the limits of the game almost within reach even after only an hour or two with the game in 15 minute Arcade. What use are the longer time-periods when the game is getting -easier- with time, and I have nothing new to do.

The further my miners are working from my town, the more time I have to react to floods and invasions, the more miners are working the faster I gain money, and thus the faster I can train warriors, seal caves, and establish outposts. It's satisfying, the sense of progression from desperately grubbing for every coin to seal my first few floods, but I felt myself reaching the limit.

And if there are more creatures than goblins and shamans, I've yet to meet them - but I dearly hope they are more than just giant hitpoint buckets. Damage sponges. I hope to see new mechanics introduced as I dig deeper.

So uh, that rambled a bit - summary; I suggest you add more structures, allowing us to build a real town and care for it, invest effort into making a real home for our dwarves, spreading the responsibilities of the Town Hall, lengthening monster sieges, and adding more depth to Dwarven life in general.

Expand. Deepen. Delve! I hope this isn't all you're planning! =)

Thanks for the fun game. I'll be playing it more soon.. I wish you luck. And congratulations for getting together with Tripwire - how do they work these days? Are they still the original modders who made that sexily realistic orchestra, or is it just a name and some businessmen now?

Hah! There's an options menu! I didn't even -see- that the first time. This is what I meant about the menu being a little confusing. It's because the Options signpost is pale, washy and blurry compared to a darker and more distinct background. It's surprisingly easy to make something effectively invisible without proper planning and an understanding of the way the viewer focuses.

My eyes slid across it completely despite carefully searching for all the 'hotspots' the first time I played.

Good options in here, some of which allay concerns mentioned above, such as the brief duration of Warnings.

Although it did remind me of something I forgot to mention; Warning Jingles/Tunes need to be more distinct, and louder. Particularly for water, so quick and deadly it be. Actually, on that account - why is water so damned deadly? I appreciate it is a 'hazard', and it certainly is a grave threat underground, but somehow Lava is the NICER of the two. I mean, Lava and Water, you'd think Lava would be the deadly, dangerous, rare, dreaded one - but really, aside from walls being slowly burnt away, it's so much slower than water it comes across as MUCH easier to deal with.

Water seems too.. fatal. If it knocked dwarves around and drowned them slowly, or flooded your Town Hall causing production of Diggers to cease and slowing all movement by 75%, that would be interesting. Dries out within a few minutes, absolutely prevents use of dynamite and walls in flooded areas, reacts with Lava to create Solidified rock?

I understand this is a fairly major thing to suggest, though =)

And on the subject of walls, I think it would be interesting to have different kinds of wall - cheaper wooden walls that burn very rapidly, more expensive stone walls that take longer to burn/hack down, perhaps. You could call the wooden ones 'barricades'.

Which leads me to think of pit props - any thoughts on the potential for tunnel collapses, or pillars to prevent them? Excessive uncontrolled mining around the base should induce 'weakness' when open areas unsupported exceed say 8x8 squares - encouraging the placement of fairly cheap 'pillar' items to prevent these collapses, which fill the area with soil, kill anyone/destroy anything beneath it, and potentially contain hidden threats, by placing a mini-cave in the middle of the blockage..

Wow, that's an impressive (and appreciated!) writeup you got there, Jakkar! Are you in the industry or do you just like game design? In any case, I like discussing design with testers. I think being open about the process is good for the game. =)

First of all, thanks for the positive feedback! As for the suggestions:

Tutorial

We know it isn't complete yet, and there are tweaks to be made! Another thing of note here is that we want the Codex to complement the tutorial on some smaller points. Having an entire tutorial for the blue buttons would, for instance, be pretty overkill. It just so happens we don't even have a Codex-entry for it yet iirc...

The difference in mood between the tutorial and arcade is an interesting point. Perhaps we should extend the tutorial to end with something similar to arcade mode, with some tips? Like a 5-minute run commented by AwesomeDwarf teaching some basics.

Main Menu

We kind of realized that it might be overwhelming when it was finished. I don't think we'll do a complete remake, but perhaps we'll tweak the positioning a bit. I suspect it would be helpful if there was a better visual cue for the clickable stuff (like... slowly blinking every now and then?)

Danger Alerts

...these will be vastly improved. Also, there are audio cues for the opening och water and lava caves on the way.

The Grand Suggestion

Yes, the empty space annoys us too. In a REALLY early beta-build (version 0.4 or 0.5 I think), all games were endless, and you literally played for HOURS. The empty space back then became pretty bizarre (but the floodwaves when you finally died, on the other hand, was quite marvellous =).

Strategic building was up for discussion for a while, as everyone likes to build stuff, but we didn't want to stray too much from the game's original design (which was even simpler than it is now). As you've mentioned in other threads, this is not a game where you create a prosperous society in your own image, but rather where you desperately try to stop suicidal maniacs from killing themselves! Communicating this to the player is, as you mentioned, a challenge.

What we will attempt to do in order to make the player more forgiving is either to just decorate the areas around the city (with expanding stone tiles, patches of parks and whatnot), OR add rewards in special caves that gives you a building to place close to your base (sort of like the special buildings in Sim City), perhaps with passive effects or just for score if they survive until the time runs out. Please note that both these ideas are just tiny figments as of now! I just wanted to assure you that we're aware of the issue

It's very possible we'll make another game that focuses more on actually building a society if this goes well, but that will be something entirely new. The current engine is not well suited for such a game!

I suspect that you found a link directly to this forum, and missed the original Po2-blogpost about the beta? The reason we disabled all time modes except 15 minutes was exactly that. As you say, even 15 minutes is enough to experience all the content if you are experienced enough. We've added a lot more in the ways of enemies since the beta release, as well as slightly redesigned the Shaman! I will make some blog posts about these changes when we get back from Gamescom, but I can tell you already that bosses are no longer pushovers or HP-buckets!

About Lava vs. Water, yeah, water is more badass... we quite like the water as it is though, but we might make lava more dangerous. This can all be tweaked with numbers, so from a technical standpoint it's fairly easy to balance in the end!

...wow. This answer became longer than I had anticipated! I hope we don't miss the release date because of it ;__;

PS: The stars are favourite icons! You can mark a dwarf with one, to be able to easily distinguish him. Also, warrior dwarfs can be sent between outposts with this, and you can teleport to a favourited dwarf by clicking the blue arrows on the bottom HUD, and then on the icons... in newer builds, these are also mapped to 0-9 on the keyboard, for quick access to your marked dwarfs.

Jakkar wrote:And congratulations for getting together with Tripwire - how do they work these days? Are they still the original modders who made that sexily realistic orchestra, or is it just a name and some businessmen now?

Despite what some might think, I wasn't bullshitting anyone when I wrote the so called press release about it! They are actually really cool to work with, and they really help us out (I was confident we made the right decision before, and even more so now). I was equally amused and amazed when I realized Yoshiro (from Tripwire) had been secretly helping people out on the forum now that we've got our hands full with GDC/gamescom

Re: Tripwire - I'm very glad to hear it. I remember being stunned back in the mod days - while I adored the gameplay of Red Orchestra, above all the intense realism and the loose aim (something all FPS games should have adopted since), the thing that struck me most was that the weapon models and sound effects verged upon.. Real. I had never seen anything that looked that good before, and didn't see anything to compete with it for some years after. A pity Ostfront never really hit 'big-time' - but it was enjoyably popular for a long while. The hardcore clanners are what keep it going, I guess. I think the biggest problem for it was colossally large maps married to low player counts, and a lack of 'progression' like unlocks or levelling to match other games of the period. I look forward to the next RO a great deal..

Re: Me! - .. No problem, I get a disturbing amount of pleasure out of design work and giving this kind of feedback - when feedback becomes open discussion, I'm basically experiencing something so fun I don't need sex in my life anymore >.>

I'm not in the industry, as you put it - for starters I hate the concept of game design as an industry while I think of it as a creative and benevolent endeavor. I want people to have fun, and I want to educate and open minds. Money is maybe a bonus but I'd rather sell low and have the highest number of happy players.

But to provide a real answer; No, I'm an unemployed, uneducated 22 year old layabout with pretensions to grand design and story. I've not completed/shipped any projects but am working on a few exciting things with a talented programmer I met back in January. I'm a bit useless though; artist/writer/voice actor/designer - all those wonderfully well-meaning but somewhat useless things that don't get anything done I wouldn't consider myself a real game designer, until I've actually seen a game out the door into the hands and minds of public players.

Now, Re: Feedback =)

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Tutorial

I enjoyed my glance through the Codex, but the 'play' icon on the pictures to indicate the movies didn't seem quite obvious enough - you've put a lot of effort into it. I don't think it would be too annoying for you to autoplay the videos when someone clicks the codex entry, as long as the volume defaults to low so you don't give anyone a heart-attack. It would ensure people notice them. Is there a way to access the Codex while ingame? I didn't find it, but the nature of the game being what it is, I've never had time to sit and fully examine the HUD.

I guess I've been thinking like a Player, not a Tester - having witnessed only one simple AI bug (jamming and twitching when in tight groups, three times over about 20 games, easily fixed in each case), I've not felt like I'm testing a beta.. It feels so complete already, except for the potential/space for new features.

Concluding the tutorial with a 'mini Arcade run' is exactly what I had in mind - that would be ideal. The final arcade level should not necessarily have a time limit, which would stress the learner, but rather have very limited space. Perhaps a 50x50unit playing field richly populated with caves and hazards. "My first Mine" playset! But with infinite time, to allow the player some basic experimentation. Include no Shaman caves, and only Silver for minerals, perhaps?

To reiterate; the 'awesomedwarf' dialogue and tutorial stuff really does make me smile - you did well there.

Main Menu

Better yet, you should place some kind of 'shopped overlay or lighting layer over it - darken non-active zones and give a little glow to clickable areas. All you've got to do is encourage the way the eye glides over it. I would suggest repainting the Options signpost though, it's pale and blurrier than the stuff behind it, inducing an uncomfortable depth of field. Being so much closer to the eye than the background activity, it needs to be in sharper focus to attract the eye, both in terms of a painting, and a functional menu. I love the animations and activity in the background in general though. It's functional, just unrefined and not fully comfortable yet. Not a major concern, compared to gameplay.

Danger Alerts

Excellent - I look forward to the new cues. A very rich 'slosh' sound for water, perhaps a volcanic rumble or a burning crackle for lava would be great.

The Grand Suggestion

Yes, the empty space annoys us too. In a REALLY early beta-build (version 0.4 or 0.5 I think), all games were endless, and you literally played for HOURS. The empty space back then became pretty bizarre (but the floodwaves when you finally died, on the other hand, was quite marvellous =).

I can imagine the beauty of it. Makes me think about 'floodgates' as an expensive late-game item, used to plug the flow down a corridor. Wood cheap, good for water, metal costs at least 150-200 but is necessary for lava. Consequently, without connection to the 'source' all liquid beyond the floodgate drains into hole, allowing you to reclaim lost areas. It IS possible to survive those epic floods with some fast wall-work, but losing 70% of the active playing-field and creating a -crevasse- of holes that eat up your dwarves forever makes the game a hollow experience, the pleasure is over and you wish you -had- died.

On that note, visual enhancement; adjascent holes should transform into aligned 'cracks', allowing you to create trenches using multiple blasts for those unfortunate 'wide edged' floods?

And tool suggestion: Warning Sign - expensive item that acts like a repelling arrow, sending drunken wandering diggers away from holes. Logic: If it's adjascent to a hole, the dwarf is alerted by bumping the sign and notices the hole, and leaves the area. However if a player attempted to exploit them to prevent dwarves digging soil or Walls, i.e. if the sign is not adjascent to a hole, but is touching soil/wall/nothing, he gets angry at the apparently pointless warning and acts as though the arrow is telling him to go TO that object, and destroy it. Consequently it has a learning curve, caveats, limitations, but prevents those godawfully depressing, score-ruining 'lemming' events involving endless hole suicides.

I understand you're supposed to be careful with dynamite and not NEED to make holes near your townhall/outposts - but sometimes a player just gets unlucky, and the game should adapt to this rather than spoil his fun entirely. Make him pay 100 for a sign to ward it off, and make Green Goblins auto-attack signs as an act of vandalism. The logic behind the suggestion of Floodgates and Warning Signs is to keep the gameworld alive, flowing, changing constantly, to maintain the player's value of the world rather than operating in absolutes, and ruining his game despite him managing to successfully stop a flood.

Well, I apologise - this was meant to be purely a reply, but I seem to have gone off on one again. *lowers eyes and types on ._.*

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Strategic building was up for discussion for a while, as everyone likes to build stuff, but we didn't want to stray too much from the game's original design (which was even simpler than it is now). As you've mentioned in other threads, this is not a game where you create a prosperous society in your own image, but rather where you desperately try to stop suicidal maniacs from killing themselves! Communicating this to the player is, as you mentioned, a challenge.

What we will attempt to do in order to make the player more forgiving is either to just decorate the areas around the city (with expanding stone tiles, patches of parks and whatnot), OR add rewards in special caves that gives you a building to place close to your base (sort of like the special buildings in Sim City), perhaps with passive effects or just for score if they survive until the time runs out. Please note that both these ideas are just tiny figments as of now! I just wanted to assure you that we're aware of the issue

It's very possible we'll make another game that focuses more on actually building a society if this goes well, but that will be something entirely new. The current engine is not well suited for such a game!

I understand =) I can't help but comment on the potential the game has, but I know both the importance of keeping things manageable and efficient in a game design, and the wish to retain the core concept. After all, there's always the chance for a sequel, or another game entirely. I agree and support the choice to avoid 'RTS elements' and keep this a 'maniac management' game. Hah. 'MMG', new genre?

Aesthetics, beautification! Exactly. My urge to give additional structures purpose was.. Well, just that - the urge to give things purpose in case you or the players didn't like the idea of extraneous, empty aesthetics - But if you're happy with sheer beautification and a few passive bonus items, that's just great. Yes, stone tiling would be ideal. Although I do find myself thinking of Dungeon Keeper - the imps, hopping up and down to 'tile' floors, claiming them, and reinforcing walls. A worthy note. It would be nice to see diggers who manage to walk around for more than 5-10 seconds without contacting a wall shift into a 'beautification' behaviour of tiling and enhancing his surroundings - but that might not work as smoothly as it looks in my head, I imagine

Simply having a slow-expanding spread of tiled floors would be nice, indeed. What if reaching 'cash milestones' like 10000, 50000, caused a fresh 'burst' of a more advanced tyle type to begin flowing from your Town Centre, a visual feedback for your success and wealth?

Perhaps a random chance of placing mushroom gardens, or fountains, or statues, or other random pretty things in open areas aligned with the grid and with the correct dimensions - i.e. 5x5. I recall Dungeon Keeper 2 had 'bonus' rooms you could achieve with very specific measurements that would unlock bonus creatures - and that Caesar 3 and Pharaoh's Garden and Plaza would change into increasingly ornate shapes and forms depending upon how large an uninterrupted square of them you placed. Good features.

Hah. I realise you're very late in development at this stage - forgive me, I don't realistically think of any of this as something you will want to put into this version even if you do enjoy the ideas - I guess I just enjoy the discussion, the mental excercise, and the simple chance I might have a positive influence on this or future projects. Put differently, I'm just a design geek =P

I suspect that you found a link directly to this forum, and missed the original Po2-blogpost about the beta? The reason we disabled all time modes except 15 minutes was exactly that. As you say, even 15 minutes is enough to experience all the content if you are experienced enough. We've added a lot more in the ways of enemies since the beta release, as well as slightly redesigned the Shaman! I will make some blog posts about these changes when we get back from Gamescom, but I can tell you already that bosses are no longer pushovers or HP-buckets!

Indeed, I was linked directly - I browsed the blog after playing, but haven't dug too deep yet (heh). I've got tabs open on the Food for Thought category, and one for the art tutorials from April which I intend to watch later. Glad to hear the creatures will have more depth =) Positive feedback: I love the visuals for weapons and armour being visible on creatures, they have a strong influence on their abilities, but also look like they SHOULD be extra dangerous. It's a good balance of visual hint and actual effect. Well done.

...wow. This answer became longer than I had anticipated! I hope we don't miss the release date because of it ;__;

Oops. Perhaps I'm secretly a double agent from the dev team of another Dwarven Diggy Diggy game, here to sabotage your progress ;>

PS: The stars are favourite icons! You can mark a dwarf with one, to be able to easily distinguish him. Also, warrior dwarfs can be sent between outposts with this, and you can teleport to a favourited dwarf by clicking the blue arrows on the bottom HUD, and then on the icons... in newer builds, these are also mapped to 0-9 on the keyboard, for quick access to your marked dwarfs.

We kind of forgot to mention that. ^^'

Hah! I was fiddling with those a few minutes ago. Having noticed they mostly didn't do anything, I did conclude they must have been some form of identification marker. A nice thought, but generally my dwarves die too randomly and horribly to develop much emotional attachment to an individual. Hm. They definitely need more ways to die. Goblin, Lava, Water, Hole, Dynamite.. Needs evil bats, naturally occurring chasms and holes, caveins.. yees.. Oh dear I've been playing Dwarf Fortress and Spelunky far too much x.x

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Well, my pleasure to have given feedback, I hope it was useful even at this late stage. It will be my pleasure to continue offering whatever help I can and 'testing' this rather enjoyable beta of yours =D

Thanks for the fun, and the discussion - I use reply notification, so reply at your leisure if at all and I'll know about it, no rush.

Hehe its really fun to read the feedback. But it can be fun to know that we take all feedback into account Ive done animations for bats but if we cant find a good funktion thay whont make it into the game . We try to make shure all enemies have a uniqe way of fighting. There will be alot of things that's still to come in to the game even if we are late in development we will add some cool extra modes in the until now secret skirmish.

Bats could emphasise behavioural modification rather than damage - invulnerable to crude axe-swings, they're not a foe, just a thing which makes dwarves panic.Increase digging speed, but cause erratic directions, or something?

When do you plan the next release? I look forward to it. Dwarfs! could be something I keep in my bottom bar for those special moments of joyous randomised distraction; like Spelunky! =D